“We Built It”

Six weeks ago, speaking off the cuff at a firehouse in Roanoke, Virginia, President Obama argued that economic growth is driven by a dynamic of both individual and collective effort, of both private and public enterprise. Here’s part of what he said:

If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

A good half-dozen times throughout the opening hours of the Republican convention—hours filled with nonprime pols and middling country singers, hours carried in full only by C-Span—the big screens on the podium showed a short film, a montage of scenes of wholesome small-business activities accompanied by the voice of Barack Obama saying the words above. Not all the words, just the ones in bold, spliced together as if delivered continuously.

I suppose Obama was guilty, if that’s the word, of speaking in a way that the unscrupulous could easily misrepresent. But it’s clear that the antecedent of the two “that”s in the second bolded excerpt was not “business.” It was “this unbelievable American system,” with its schools and roads and bridges (and its Internet and its firefighters and, by extension, its rule of law and its relatively peaceful, relatively stable, relatively just social order). And it’s clear that the President’s point was what he said it was, the point I’ve italicized. Thus the oft-repeated film, the essence of which was repeated by speaker after speaker, was not simply a matter of taking some words “out of context.” It was a conscious lie.

“We Built It” was the “theme” of the day, emblazoned on the screens and chanted by the crowd. “We Built It” is not a lie, exactly, but as a slogan it is built on a lie. Of course “we” built “it.” But the Republican “we” consists solely of the owners of businesses, and the Republican “it” is not the United States of America in all its messy, variegated, democratic glory.